Catcher in the Rye - A Book Review

"I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible."

There are books which I read and think that the book was fine, a good read but it is not among my top favorites or top reads, which comprises of around 60 odd titles. Then, there are some which I like while reading and the book adds a lot to me and the way I think. It may not look evident from my behavior but it opens some new compartment in my conscience. Then, there are books which I wish I had not taken up reading. However, some books do leave an impact, but it is tough to categorize it immediately. As the time moves on, I put them in one of my imaginary shelves. This book is one such example.

It is definitely not a fast read, with page turning enthusiasm that someone like Orwell, Puzo or Brown gave me. It is a slow, complex book with simple story. I usually take up a book when I see that a lot of people have read it and hence, it must be good, or when I see it on a list of books of some genre that I like. But it was different. I saw it once among the top five contemporary English novels of the century and I thought that I must give it a try sometimes. I tried it once a couple of years back, but then I threw it away as I found it boring and slow. It still was when I read it two weeks back. But then, I had this feeling that the book might offer me something that I had not anticipated before and I gave it a try, hoping to not end up being wrong. I wasn’t.

Catcher in the Rye gives a lot to ask oneself. A high school kid, shamelessly criticizing everything around him is not a unique personality. It could be anyone of us, in fact he is us. I once had this feeling when I was younger that I was the best. Then, after seeing some people who fared better than me in some way or the other, I decided that I was amongst the best. But, somehow, that has changed and I no longer think in terms of good, bad, best or anything quantitative. You cannot judge people by numbers. You judge them by their actions. You judge them by their attitude. And those cannot be measured, not by any scale I know of. Holden is the confused protagonist in the story, who thinks everything around him is fraudulent (phony, as he puts it) and he must not stay amongst those people. I thought, in the beginning, that he is genuinely hurt by the society and his peers for high expectations, which turned out to be wrong because as the story went on, he started contradicting himself by hating those things too which were dear to him once.

His little sister plays a crucial role to bring him back to reality. She is the dearest thing/person in his life, the one whom he genuinely loves. When she tells him that what he is doing, which was leaving the school and home and the city to go to the east and become a worker in a ranch, was hurting everyone, he didn’t realize it meant so much to her for him to stay. But, one afternoon spent with her changed his mind. It changed what he was or how he thought. Perhaps he just delayed his eventual breakdown when he would run away, but it somehow calmed him to see that someone really cared about him and that he can start liking and loving things again.

Holden is careless, he sees evil in everything. He is charitable, he is good at heart, but he hates everything. He brings out the bitter truth that most of the things in this world are lies. The affection that teachers show you, the friendship of your neighbor, the make-up of old women sitting in a bar in the middle of a night, the pianist who greets requests only from rich people, everything is a lie and a method to lie to yourself. He liked a girl, and then he disliked her because she was too possessive. He liked a girl whom he met a couple of years back, but didn’t have the courage to call her home. He is eliminated from school without telling his parents. He is not able to concentrate for more than a minute on something and he hates that, but he does nothing to improve it. Is it not something we are too?

The book asks serious questions, the strongest one being that are we doing anything to improve ourselves? Are we doing anything to balance our lives between hating things we dislike and working with them because some things are needed to be done? Are we really listening to ourselves as to what we want or are we just flowing down the river to reach the next shore? We are just ignorant of things around us because knowing them will not comfort us. That is what we do. That is what Holden did not choose to do. What should we do really? That is the real question.